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Marionette Template
Hollow, lightweight vec and robot bodies |
 Image from Steve Bowers |
Lightweight bodies of this kind are also used in robotic design, and their collapsable form and minimal mass allows numerous bots to be stored and transported with ease.
While the concept of the Marionettes dates back to Before Tranquility and there was a brief fad during The Solsys Golden Age for marionette-inspired robots, it wasn't until after the dissolution of the First Federation when the technology advanced far enough to fit a Turingrade A.I. into a humanoid-sized body, that a group of historians and artistically-inclined vecs created the original marionette template. This proved to be fairly popular with multiple clades adopting or modifying their own version of the template with more being created over time. In the current era while their are a uncounted amount of minor templates floating around The Known Net, they have mostly been consolidated or combined into about a thousand major templates that feature extremely deep levels of customization and refinement with about half a million further variations in total.
A Puppet's body is often composed of a computronium core with some basic communicators, sensors and short-term batteries wrapped in a durable shell with a shock absorbing lining. This is suspended inside of an outer shell with power, data and cooling lines connected. The outer shell is commonly constructed from structural hypercapacitor segments with artificial muscles or electric motors to provide support and locomotion, while incorporating various sensors, support structures and other miscellaneous parts. A downside of the template is that due to their lightweight nature they can be inconvenienced by things like a stiff breeze or the loss of traction while moving, but this can be solved with the use of magnetic, chemical and electrostatic attraction or the use of ballast with inert material or stockpiles of useful resources like fuel, feedstock cache or extra power storage. There are designs that integrate computronium directly into the segments - bypassing the need for a computronium core, although it is uncommon because of the segments lack of protection compared to a dedicated core and possible issues with signal delays making it difficult to fully integrate all of the processing power into the mind, especially with body layouts that have many long limbs and are without any large segments.
The appearance and layout of a Marionette wildly varies from being to being and from clade to clade, from a size that can barely fit a remote control systems to multi-ton transapient behemoths, the colour and texture of their shell, the body plan and amount of limbs to the use of multiple computronium cores to form a polysophont entity or to form a small virtual world to having tens of thousands of small marionettes form a polysomatic mind. Some even incorporate Ultimate Muscles and Ultimate Chips in their construction if they are lucky enough to have access to them.
Notable Templates, Clades and Individuals
Puppeteers Template
The Puppeteers sub-template with influence from Bespoker design philosophy takes this a step further by incorporating an universal joint attachment system and an mechanism mechanism to allow the artificial muscles to attach and disconnect from different segments along with giving all segments a coating of Programmable Quantum-Dot Arrays, while the core is outfitted with gel smart matter tentacles that can act as power, data and cooling lines while providing movement without a shell. This allows them to quickly change the appearance of their outer shell, switch segments or change their shell entirely to a different one easily.Fan Sailor Template
Due to the Marionette Template's lightweight design, it is easy to incorporate the ability to fly. This template takes the design a step further and specialises for gas giants and Microgravity environments.Often possessing long spindly arms connected at a central point with Fancloth webbing in between, this makes them good at gliding on currents of air and with enough thermal updrafts that they can stay aloft indefinitely in an atmosphere. There are a few variations that improve this template's utility such as nanotech solar cells replacing the mesh between each fan motor, lowering the thrust but gaining the ability to recharge with sunlight and beamed power and Aerovac cells in or replacing each segment. While designed for Microgravity, they can move along the ground under gravity although it is fairly ungainly with them having to move their limbs in a wave-like motion, it is more common to detach their arms and fancloth, leaving only a couple of segments to act as legs if the conversion becomes absolutely necessary.
Dollhouse Clade
This clade came into existence by accident when a homemade doll playhouse that controled a family of dolls to act out their lives was abandoned on a failed asteroid habitat for about 4,300 to 4,350 years, by the best estimates. During the time before their discovery and re-introduction to the galactic stage in 8847 AT, the personality sims that drive the dolls' actions started to mutate due to the sheer number of scenarios and interactions based on an archive of children's media they had downloaded. Starting as a simple family bonding experience, the dolls built various objects and buildings out of the basic Smart Matter which the playhouse was made from. This smart matter contained a fair amount of computronium along with data, power and wireless connectivity allowing it to connect to the playhouse and increase the computational power available. With the increase in resources the scenario generator started to create more and more complex scenarios allowing the likelihood of more smart matter being created, create an positive feedback loop and over time created the resources to host new dolls with their own personality sims. Once the number of dolls reached a critical mass they began to interact with themselves of their own accord and even started assigning themselves 'pretend' jobs and having hobbies, this generated lots of data for the personality sims to digest and modify themselves with and eventually becoming sophont. Upon contact with the wider galaxy they had converted the asteroid into a Smart Matter city with their culture containing a mix of parts from the children's media archive even if it didn't make any logical sense. Unfortunately this had the side effect of destroying most evidence of their history.Nine Eyes
Also known as [ (-) (-) (-) (-) (+) (-) (-) (-) (-) ], these are a modosophont clade known for their transavant spike with transavant abilities along with having formed a tribemind with eight expert systems, each with transavant spikes in a different area of expertise. These expert systems are verified by trusted transapients and are housed in the same marionette template body as a Nine Eyes. This body reflects eir namesake by always having nine eye balls, with one being larger than the others.Related Articles
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Development Notes
Text by Nuthenry2
Initially published on 27 November 2024.
Initially published on 27 November 2024.
